Spies in the Skies [Fostered by Obama, Inherited by Trump]

Each weekday, dozens of U.S. government aircraft take to the skies and slowly circle over American cities. Piloted by agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the planes are fitted with high-resolution video cameras, often working with “augmented reality” software that can superimpose onto the video images everything from street and business names to the owners of individual homes. At least a few planes have carried devices that can track the cell phones of people below. Most of the aircraft are small, flying a mile or so above ground, and many use exhaust mufflers to mute their engines — making them hard to detect by the people they’re spying on.

The government’s airborne surveillance has received little public scrutiny — until now. BuzzFeed News has assembled an unprecedented picture of the operation’s scale and sweep by analyzing aircraft location data collected by the flight-tracking website Flightradar24 from mid-August to the end of December last year, identifying about 200 federal aircraft. Day after day, dozens of these planes circled above cities across the nation.

The FBI and the DHS would not discuss the reasons for individual flights but told BuzzFeed News that their planes are not conducting mass surveillance.

The DHS said that its aircraft were involved with securing the nation’s borders, as well as targeting drug smuggling and human trafficking, and may also be used to support investigations by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. The FBI said that its planes are only used to target suspects in specific investigations of serious crimes, pointing to a statement issued in June 2015, after reporters and lawmakers started asking questions about FBI surveillance flights.

“It should come as no surprise that the FBI uses planes to follow terrorists, spies, and serious criminals,” said FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, in that statement. “We have an obligation to follow those people who want to hurt our country and its citizens, and we will continue to do so.”
…

What’s problematic is that the FBI follows all of us and then, after the fact, picks out alleged terrorists, spies and serious criminals.

The FBI could just as easily select people on their way to a tryst with a government official’s wife, or to attend an AA meeting, or to attend an unpopular church.

Once collected, the resulting information is subject to any number of uses and abuses.

Aldhous and Seife report the flights drop 70% on the weekend so if you are up to mischief, plan around your weekends.

When writing about the inevitable surveillance excesses under President Trump, give credit to President Obama and his supporters, who built the surveillance state Trump inherited.

This entry was posted
on Tuesday, November 29th, 2016 at 1:48 pm and is filed under FBI, Government, Privacy.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.